A solar panel recycling plant in Texas will process 1 panel a minute
We Recycle Solar plans to open a solar panel recycling plant in Texas, on a 10 acre site outside Dallas, designed to process 1 retired solar panel every minute once it starts operating in the third quarter of 2027. Solar panel recycling means pulling reusable materials, silver, copper, silicon, aluminum and glass, out of a panel that has reached the end of its working life, typically 25 to 35 years. The plant is designed to recover up to 96% of that material value for domestic manufacturers rather than shipping it overseas. We Recycle Solar calls it the first United States end to end critical materials recovery plant dedicated to retired solar panels, a claim by the company itself, not an independently confirmed industry first.
A typical solar panel is about 75% glass by weight, the federal Environmental Protection Agency states, with an aluminum frame, copper wiring and a plastic junction box already easy to recycle, plus smaller but valuable amounts of silver and internal copper. The agency says solar panel recycling in the United States is new and still growing, not yet happening on a large scale, even as it projects retired panels worldwide will hold about 450 million dollars a year of recoverable raw material by 2030, equal to about 60 million new panels worth of material.
Why copper and silver make this a critical minerals story
The federal government added copper and silver to its Final 2025 List of Critical Minerals only on November 7, 2025, in the Federal Register. Critical mineral status means the government has judged the country too dependent on imported supply of that material, and at risk if supply is disrupted. Net import reliance, the share of a metal used in the country that comes from imports, rose for silver from 68% in 2024 to an estimated 77% in 2025, and for copper from 45% in 2024 to an estimated 57% in 2025, a 9 percentage point jump for silver and a 12 percentage point jump for copper, both calculated from the United States Geological Survey own published figures. Both import reliance jumps landed the same year We Recycle Solar announced a plant built to pull silver and copper back out of old solar panels.
The 2025 figure is a United States Geological Survey estimate, marked e in the original table.
Show the numbers
| 2021 | 76 |
| 2022 | 67 |
| 2023 | 69 |
| 2024 | 68 |
| 2025 | 77 |
The 2025 figure is a United States Geological Survey estimate, marked e in the original table.
Show the numbers
| 2021 | 44 |
| 2022 | 41 |
| 2023 | 42 |
| 2024 | 45 |
| 2025 | 57 |
A 100 million dollar plan for 4 more plants
We Recycle Solar plans to invest approximately 100 million dollars in 4 additional recycling facilities over the next 4 years, though the company has not disclosed where they will be built. The company says it has already diverted more than 1 million solar panels from landfill through operations it describes as spanning more than 4 countries, with the capability to process up to 100,000 pounds of equipment a day at each site. Adam Saghei, founder and chief executive of We Recycle Solar, says no American company has previously been able to recover the full resources of a retired solar panel at this scale or efficiency.
According to a figure Electrek attributes to the United States Department of Energy, about 70% of solar installations worldwide have gone up since 2019, and a typical panel keeps working for 25 to 35 years. Most of those panels will not need recycling for decades, which is why a company is betting 100 million dollars on new recycling capacity the same year copper and silver both joined the government critical minerals list, years before that wave is due to retire.